The Lennon Report

What starts out as a Famous Death procedural like 2013’s undervalued Parkland becomes an odd exercise in score-settling in Jeremy Profe’s The Lennon Report, which recounts the hours following John Lennon’s murder. On the same night that WABC-TV news producer and leather-clad motorcycle enthusiast Alan Weiss (co-screenwriter Walter Vincent) is taken to New York’s Roosevelt Hospital after an accident, Lennon is shot and rushed there as well, where hunky Dr. Halleran (Evan Jonigkeit) and toothsome Nurse Kammerer (Stef Dawson) struggle to resuscitate Lennon as Weiss attempts to break the story. What hampers The Lennon Report are its austere budget — we’re told that 1980 is an especially violent year in New York, yet the hospital is all but deserted — and its occasionally sub-par acting, including a howler of a scene in which Kammerer comforts Halleran for not being able to save “the voice of his childhood.” And where Parkland avoided the question of who shot Kennedy, The Lennon Report plays up a far less intriguing mystery by ending with large on-screen text revealing the shocking truth: Though we see Kammerer operating on Lennon in this (fictionalized) account, emergency department head Dr. Lynn (Richard Kind) has claimed to have performed the surgery, but that “We Were Unable To Find Anyone That Could Corroborate Dr. Lynn’s Account.” OK, then!